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YouTube officially launched prerecorded 360 degree video back in March 2015. The videos would surround your field of view with scrollable video rather than the usual stationary 16:9 frame. Now, Google is adding the ability to livestream 360° video directly on YouTube.

There are already a few 360° videos on YouTube, but Google will demo the livestreaming feature at the Coachella Music Festival this weekend. For "select artist performances," fans will be able to see the band and then turn around to see the crowd. YouTube also has the ability to do spatial audio now, so when you turn away from the band, the sound will change in relation to the viewport.

Providing this video live will probably take a lot of bandwidth. The 360° videos are just really long videos that wrap around the viewer, so they end up hitting a 4K horizontal resolution pretty easily. There's also the ability to livestream in 3D, so that's two 4K videos—one for each eye. You'll also need a 360° camera, which are becoming more available with products like the Bublcam, Giroptic’s 360cam, IC Real Tech’s Allie, Kodak’s SP360, and Ricoh's Theta.

For viewers, 360° video can be watched on a computer with a scrolling viewport, on a mobile device where your phone is the viewpoint camera, or you can strap on a VR headset and jump inside the video.

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Ron Amadeo
Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. Emailron@arstechnica.com//Twitter@RonAmadeo